Video: Customizing Editor preferences

The Editor has its own preferences which are separate from the Organizer preferences that let you customize the way all the editing workspaces in your Editor behave. Changing preferences from their defaults is completely optional. You might use the Editor without ever visiting its preferences. But if you want to know where the preferences are, I'd like to show you, and I'll point out a few that you might want to consider changing. On a PC, preferences in the Editor are located under the Edit menu. On a Mac, they're located under the Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor menu.

In this course, author Jan Kabili introduces the photo organizing, editing, and sharing features of Adobe Photoshop Elements 10, the less expensive version of Photoshop that’s ideal for casual photographers who want to achieve professional results. The course covers importing, organizing, and finding photos with the Organizer. It explains how and when to use each of the editing workspaces—from the simple Quick Fix and Guided Edit workspaces to the Full Edit workspace for enhancing your photos—including making photo corrections, retouching, compositing images, and adding text. The final chapter offers creative ways to share photos with Elements, including print projects like greeting cards, calendars, and books, emailing photos, and posting them on Facebook and Flickr.

Customizing Editor preferences

The Editor has its own preferences which are separate from the Organizerpreferences that let you customize the way all the editing workspaces inyour Editor behave.Changing preferences from their defaults is completely optional.You might use the Editor without ever visiting its preferences.But if you want to know where the preferences are, I'd like to show you, andI'll point out a few that you might want to consider changing.On a PC, preferences in the Editor are located under the Edit menu.On a Mac, they're located under the Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor menu.

You can choose a category of preferences from the submenu or you can open theGeneral Preferences and then move to specific categories from this column on the right.Here in the General preferences, there are a couple that you might consider changing.If you don't like seeing the little yellow tooltips that pop up as you're usingthe program, you can uncheck Show tool Tips like this.In an earlier movie in this chapter, I showed you that if you're working withmultiple documents, and you want to allow one or more photos to float free inits own window, rather than be snapped to the tabs of a document window, you cancheck Allow Floating Documents in Full Edit mode.

I usually leave that unchecked.I'm going to skip to the Performance category of preferences next to show youthat you can go here to the History States field, to change the number of statesavailable for your undos, and the number of states in the Undo History panel.You can take the number of History States from its default of 50 all the way upto 1000, but I don't suggest you do that because adding too many History Statescan theoretically affect performance.Next I'll go to the Displays & Cursors preferences, and this is a place where Iusually do make a change.

The default way to view the tips of tools that use brush tips is with theNormal Brush Tip display.And that displays the cursors for the brush- like tools at only 50% of their actual size.That can be a little deceiving, particularly when you're using a soft edge brush.So I like to change this to see the Full -Size Brush Tip and I also like to showa crosshair on my brush tips, so that I know where the center of the brush is.Here you can see a little preview of how your brush tips will look with these changes.

Next, I'll go to the Units & Rulers category preferences, and up to the Rulers menu.If you mostly use Elements to prepare images for the web and you like to use theRulers and Elements Editor to line things up, you can change the default unitsof measurement on the rulers from inches to pixels from here.For Print, I would leave that set to inches.If you do make changes to your Editor preferences, and you want to reset thoseback to the way they were when you opened the Preferences dialog box, you can dothat by clicking the Reset button over here on the right.

When you're done tweaking your preferences, click OK to close this dialog box.One more thing about preferences, if your Editor is acting funky, it could bebecause the Editor Preferences file has gotten corrupted.To fix that, close your Editor, and re-launch it, either from yourPrograms folder on the PC or your Applications folder on the Mac, or fromElements Welcome Screen.Immediately after you start launching the Editor, hold down a trio of keys onyour keyboard which I'll tell you in a moment, and keep those held down untilyou see a message asking if you want to delete your settings file?On a PC, that trio of keys is Alt+Ctrl+Shift.

On a Mac, those keys are Option+Command+Shift.After a few seconds, you'll get a message, asking if you want to delete theAdobe Photoshop Elements Settings File.At that point, you can release the trio of keys, and click Yes in that message.That will cause a new preferences file with default settings to beautomatically created for you, and it will hopefully fix any problems that youhad in your Editor.There are lots of other preferences available in the Editor Preferences windowother then those that I showed you here.You're of course welcome to explore them.

But my general advice is not to change a Preference unless you know what itdoes, so you don't trigger unintended consequences.

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